I invite you to listen really deeply and with your whole body,
every cell, to the wordless invisible Aliveness that is here. Say
yes to being no one. Yes to resting in Nothing. Yes to open
palmed, emptied-out pockets, open-hearted clueless offering of
your whole being to just right here. Good-bye cleverness,
good-bye being right, good-bye getting ahead, good-bye being on
top. Welcome to nowhere.

Let everything die here. Let everything be washed away here. Let
yourself be made so new, bathed in your own Innocent being.
Giving over everything else to the Ocean and letting it dissolve
like salt.

We must be emptied over and over and over. We must empty as the
Holy, before the Holy, humbled, nothing, offered, waiting on
nothing, listening deeply to nothing.

We are much vaster than our minds can conceive. We must be
charmed, tricked, invited, welcomed, kept company with, to drop
out of our everyday social reality, into right here.

We want to be moved by something other than fear. We have to let
the winds come and the rains come and the storms come and be
pushed to the ground. We must cling to It, beg Its mercy for
every foolish moment that we thought that we were someone and
could get somewhere without This.

Dare to say the dangerous prayer: Holy Nothing, take everything
that's not You and leave me here, naked, stripped of every
pretending and striving. Only in the Nothing, only as Nothing,
only as No One, will I ever find what I'm looking for. So take my
quest for enlightenment and take my fears that I'm a schmuck and
just leave me here without a clue, completely open. No idea what
I am or where I'm going. Just here, the quiet open, waiting for
your Breath to play me.

We don't need any improvement. We don't need anything more. We
just need to stop and notice. And let be whatever's here, meet
it. Until we have the kind of heart that's so empty for having
kissed everything in it, that it can kiss anything and call it
Beloved.

There are a few kinds of peace. There's one that can be shattered
because it's based on quiet music and having things just the way
we feel comfortable having them. There's that kind of peace,
which is a relative peace. And then there's the peace that is
always here, if we check, as this content-less awareness looking
out of our eyes. That content-less awareness that all of our
freak-outs arise in, is never freaked out.

To be a sensitive squishy being in a loud world hurts sometimes.
To witness cruelty, or to have it aimed at us, hurts. That's not
a mistake. It's not a shortcoming. This is the nature of being
alive and in the raw moment, is that things that are delusion,
hurt.

We think when our hearts start to melt that there's something
wrong. When the heart starts to ache we start to become so
sensitive to the smallest hatred, whether at us or someone hating
themselves. We think that's all wrong, that we're supposed to
transcend all that and just smile. The only true transcendence,
truly embodied transcendence, happens by meeting everything and
kissing it right on the face. Anything else is an escape.

We are here for the Holy to unfold through us. There is not a
single one left out of that. Not a single one in whom the process
of unfolding is not happening, just perfectly.

- Jeannie Zandi. You can be added to or removed from Jeannie's
newsletter e-list by emailing [email protected] .